I am trying to get my external Ip using cygwin on a Windows 7 box. I am almost there but I am having an issue with the sed substitution syntax. As you see, I am getting the IP, but I don't want the </body> part of the output.

How do I have to change the sed command? Instead of creating the index1.html file, I also tried unsuccessfully to use pipe and grep, but failed to get that working properly. Alternative approaches would also be appreciated, but I would like to know what I am doing wrong with the sed commands. I have tried many different variations, but just can't seem to get just the IP address.

The "cut" and "awk" commands used in your examples produced slightly different results, but each example was most helpful in illustrating the basics of these two commands. I now have two command options for filtering output/text.

You could also skip the intermediate file by using curl instead of wget, which is a command whose main use is to pipe a web page as a text stream to some other command. Some systems come without curl preinstalled, but it's quite common (and useful) in scripts, so in that case I recommend installing it.